Gel Printed Bird Tag

I thought that I would take part in the latest challenge over on Tag Tuesday - Birds. 

I had fun with the background. I have books in a few languages which I can tear pages out of to use for just such a project.  I chose a page from a book of Moliere plays, tore it into strips and added them to a #8 manilla tag.

Using my large Gel Press plate on a mount, I added a layer of Cornflower Blue Archival ink.  The ink pad was pressed onto the gel plate, a brayer used to smooth out the ink and the tag laid face down onto the plate and rubbed on the back.

I repeated the process using Mermaid Lagoon Archival ink, but this time I laid a lace swatch from Clarity over my tag and used the gel plate like a stamp on its mega mount to press down onto the tag through the lace.

As the resulting background reminded me of clouds, it was obvious to use a bird as my focal point.  I had experimented with adding the lace imprint onto white card by laying the lace over the gel plate and pressing card down onto the plate through the lace.  As you can see, not very successful.

I didn't want to waste the card, so I stamped the House Martin stamp (Clarity NDC Back Issue 112) onto it using Cobalt Blue Archival ink.

This was coloured in using watercolour pencils, fussy cut and sealed using distress glaze.

I then added the image to my tag and sealed it using Distress collage medium.

Once completely dry, I added shading around the focal point using a Cobalt Blue Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen, blending the ink out with my fingers.  This only works on a sealed, non porous surface.  I also added a couple of Tim Holtz Small Talk stickers which seemed to fit my theme.

Although I was already working on a tag, I wanted to add a smaller one as well. I added a lace effect to a second piece of card in the same way as I had for the larger tag (far more successful as you can see).

The second smallest tag from the Clarity Tag stamp set was added in Cobalt Blue ink and fussy cut.  I used my Crop-o-dile on its smallest setting to punch the hole.

Inspire from mini word chains 5&6 was also added in the same ink.

This mini tag was then added to the larger one using a large pearl coloured brad.

To finish, I added shading to the sentiment strips and around the smaller tag using the same Cobalt Blue Pitt Artist brush pen and method as for the bird.